[TUHS] Isaacson v Unix [really RMS bashing]

[A. P. Garcia]

On Sun, Jan 6, 2019, 9:12 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 06, 2019 at 08:38:45PM -0500, Toby Thain wrote:
> > On 2019-01-06 6:41 PM, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> > > ...
> > > As others have said, I don't conflate coding prowess with the ability
> to
> > > design.  I've had many an argument with John Gilmore (one of the people
> > > who doesn't mind footing the cleaning and repair bill after allowing
> RMS
> > > to stay at his place) where he begins with "When I wrote GNU tar..."
> I've
> > > always responded by saying that writing tar is no big deal; the
> specification
> > > was the hard part.
> > >
> >
> > Hear, hear. I'd aver this is very much the case in any typical
> > software-related day job, and _definitely_ mine.
>
> Yep.  The spec is hard, the code is easy.  That is a pattern.
>
> I've been the guy behind decent sized projects, BitKeeper is 2673371
> lines of code.  Getting to a spec was hard, writing the code was easy.
> We were a tiny distributed team of about 10 engineers, the hard part was
> agreeing on a design.  Which we did by getting on the phone and talking
> about what we talked about yesterday.  We passed the idea between people
> and when we could do the pass back and forth and nothing had changed
> from the previous pass, we had a design.  Coding that was just typing.
>
> It's very similar to what Udi Manber told me as an under grad, he said
> writing papers is easy.  Not for me.  But I came to understand that
> papers are two things: a big base of knowledge and an outline.  If you
> have those two then the paper is just typing.  He was right.
>

Coming back full circle, maybe the person with the right viewpoint was
actually RMS. It's not about the technology. It's not about the code or the
spec. Maybe it really is about the freedoms that he talks about. Maybe if
bit keeper were FOSS from the start, the world would be using that instead
of git. But where would be the value proposition in that? It's a tough
question.

>
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